SUPERHUMAN LIFE No. 86

WHERE IS THERE THEN SUPERHUMAN LIFE?

by Ernest O'Neill

In Christ! Now don't go to sleep intellectually and tune out! The
religious people have - with the best intentions in the world - turned
this statement of reality into a mantra or clich?. But this is what we
have been saying to each other all along - that our creator made you and
me - in his son - way before he made the earth. And that he did all this -
right in line with what Einstein discovered - in the one great eternal
moment where He sees all things at once. In other words, it is really true
what the physicists and cosmologists tell us - time does go slower the
farther out in space you go. Obviously, even in physical terms, there's a
place where it is one eternal moment!

Why in Christ?

There our creator can see everything - millions of years - certainly
your life - in one moment. He therefore knew that the gift of free will
meant we had to be given the opportunity to destroy him if we wished - and
he had to be able to survive that and yet bear what we did - otherwise
free will was simply a mirage. So he made us inside his own son, who then
bore inside himself all our egotistic yearnings and destructive cruelty -
and held on to us - so that we could continue to share his own eternity.
So he actually lives in each of now - and we live in him - even though the
life most of us live now is the flashback to the earth-life and its
consequences which we would have experienced if he hadn't held us inside
himself out of love for us.

This is why we say - there's superhuman life in Christ - because he is
inside you waiting for you to let him live your life - the life that he
looked forward to when he made you inside himself. That life appears at
times in you when you seem to have an odd moment of real unselfish
feeling, but generally you live life imprisoned in your own earthy closed
universe. All of this is what one of the earliest church fathers said -
his name was Athanasius, and he explained that everyone who builds a house
makes provision for its repair - so God made provision in his son for the
repair of our human soul if we maimed or perverted it by our own wills.

So - This is "Your" Life - Christ's Life in You!

Most of us have had moments when we did sense something higher inside us
than ourselves - moments when we acted and thought above ourselves. It
isn't just Handel who wrote the famous Messiah in three weeks - we, too,
have at times done things that we didn't know we had the power to do.
Those moments are "signals from outer space" - from eternity -
from God's Son inside each of us. And - far from being exceptional - that
is the life we have been made to experience every day. Indeed, the lack of
this reality is what brings black depression into our minds - or the
hopeless empty feeling we have as we get older. Those signals are simply
our dear Father Creator telling us we're missing the secret of life - his
son inside us!

So What Do We Do?

Begin to believe this! That's the first obvious step. Then start
reorienting the way we think each moment. Stop thinking that we're little
human animals out here on our own - start realising that there is a dear
person (Christ's own Spirit) inside us who has a whole existence that he
wishes to share with us. He has things to do and say here on earth in us
that we have ignored. Let's see that he has borne all our wretched
mistakes as well as all our self-righteous goodness - He bore it before
even the world was made (John in the Bible writes that Christ was "crucified
from before the foundation of the world"). This was so that God could
bear it all and destroy it all in Christ (this is part of the meaning of
what Paul meant when he wrote "our old self was crucified with Him").
Only God can bring about a retroactive destruction of the mess we have
created with our lives - but he can - and had done that, so believe that -
because "without faith it is impossible to please God".

Many of us try to eradicate our evil self by psychology and the power of
positive thinking, but there is only one way - "by the spirit to put
to death the deeds of the body" - and that way is to believe that our
Creator ended that subverted life of ours in his Son in timeless eternity.
We can turn from the shadow - or burned out cinder of that former life -
right now.

The Kingdom of God is Within You

Then begins your real life - because inside you is Christ's own spirit -
He will begin to give you a whole new way of thinking and acting and
feeling. This means the end of a life lived in reaction - reaction to what
this person says or what that government or boss does. It means an end to
a life dominated by what the media or your peers expect of you. As you
start to look to Christ himself, you'll realise that you are actually part
of him. In fact, you are him - not in the way megalomaniacs think - they
think that they are Christ - apart from Christ. You realise that you are
part of him - his actual expression - precisely because He Himself is in
you.

But it's vital to see that you are Him in the sense that his living in
your name is a life that He has never lived before. You're not just living
a version of his Galilee life - you're launching out on an exciting
adventure - to live a life that God's Son has never lived before in the
universe - and that he has been looking forward to that as much as you!